Death Valley is the hottest, driest, lowest, place in North America.  It is also home to thousands of desert-dwelling plants, animals, and paleontological artifacts.  After the National Park Service took over management of the valley in 1933, park rangers struggled to develop a coherent strategy that would protect it and also allow tourists to visit there in comfort. This presentation traces rangers' use of research on paleontology, wildlife biology, botany, and geology to accomplish their management goals on a proposed road through a small canyon with hundreds of well-preserved prehistoric footprints.  It highlights how resource managers inconsistently translated research into practical policies and discusses how their decisions impacted plants, animals, and the landscape itself.  It raises questions about hierarchies of knowledge and what constitutes science.  It also invites discussion on how federal agencies engage subject matter specialists as they formulate public policy.  The constellation of factors that ultimately led to the road project's abandonment show how the agency interpreted scientific findings and used them to influence the physical shape of Death Valley.  

In 1972, Claude Teague, the Director of Corporate Research at R.J. Reynolds, argued that the tobacco industry should think of itself as being "a specialized, highly ritualized segment of the pharmaceutical industry." Reynolds, he claimed, was ultimately in the business of selling a drug: nicotine. What had prompted this remarkable statement? 
In the 1960s, behavioral pharmacology revolutionized addiction research. Rats and monkeys, researchers showed, would press levers hundreds of times to obtain doses of drugs like heroin and cocaine. These experiments constituted a direct attack on the Freudian-inspired post-war consensus that drug use was a uniquely human fault, a maladaptive attempt to cope with an underlying personality disorder. But if animals self-administered drugs, who could argue that they did so because of their upbringing or social milieu? Behavioral pharmacology reoriented the study of addiction from psychological to biological explanations and helped to destigmatize drug use. 
But, as I show in my paper, it also effected a complete reorientation in the self-understanding of cigarette makers from tobacco manufacturers to nicotine merchants. Monkeys, new studies soon showed, would readily self-administer nicotine, showing that smoking was ultimately not about taste but about the nicotine. The discovery that smokers, as one industry scientist put it, were "equivalent to monkeys pressing levers" set off a race to experiment with new tobacco strains and additives to make smoking more addictive. But behaviorism and its vocabulary of stimuli and reinforcers ultimately also provided the motivation to develop new fraudulent low-tar "light" and "ultralight" cigarettes.
 
 

Every member of the species Cyprinodon diabolis, the Devils Hole pupfish, lives and reproduces in a desert pool ten-feet across by sixty-feet long. In recent years, managers from Death Valley National Park have observed as few as thirty-five individual fish in this habitat. The whole species could fit in a pint glass and lives a habitat the size of a city bus.

A part of my book manuscript, this paper examines the science of naming and classifying the pupfish. Environmental historians are experts at showing how endangered species become embedded in the social, especially in fights over conservation, development, and identity. This paper elaborates on this body of work by integrating an insight from the history of science: “species” themselves are not neutral, timeless categories, but produced through a social-scientific process.

Focusing on the history of early twentieth century ichthyology, I show how the methods of collecting, storing, and classifying (through morphometric analysis) enabled the fish from Devils Hole to be defined as their own unique species. This process had important implications for the pupfish’s conservation—especially in the decision to add the habitat to the national park system—but also entailed substantial risk to the fish through the overcollecting of specimens. Scientists may have “saved” the pupfish through their naming, but simultaneously endangered them through the same process.

Accidents of geology and history made Kentucky’s Inner Bluegrass region into one of the world’s premier areas for raising thoroughbred horses. Limestone-rich soils provided the region’s eponymous grasses with high levels of calcium and other nutrients that resulted in strong and fast-growing horses. Geology, ecological relationships, political economy, and human agency created the Inner Bluegrass in the image of the horse, but the areas of California that became thoroughbred havens did not enjoy the biological and geological advantages that propelled Kentucky to the forefront of the horse industry in the nineteenth century. Instead, twentieth-century California capitalists scooped up horses (because that’s what wealthy people did) and forced the landscape to support them with extreme techno-scientific intervention. With chemical fertilizers, standardized feed, and complex irrigation systems, Californians brought the Bluegrass to the West.
California thoroughbreds embodied many things: social institutions, economic relationships, and chemical research, but they were also products of human imagination. Using a case study of a farm in San Diego County, I argue that wealthy Californians intervened in the material world to make the landscapes of their imaginations. The history of California is the history of land speculation. California was the land of boosters and that proved no different for the horsey set. Thoroughbred owners overcame the limitations of California geography to raise horses that rivalled Kentucky’s thoroughbred crop.